Free Flush Volume 15
I’m late to the year but that just means I have more to choose from! The Free Bandcamp Wiki 2022 has been established over at my site Noob Heavy, I just come to the Toilet Ov Hell to shit. Since I had so many exciting releases to choose from you can bet on an eclectic mix. Yell bingo if you like everything on here, I believe we are spiritually aligned and have great purpose in the machinations of gods.
Check out the previous volumes below, this is absolutely the longest I’ve managed to stick to a column.
Vol 1 – Vol 2 – Vol 3 – Vol 4 – Vol 5 – Vol 6 – Vol 7 – Vol 8 – Vol 9 – Vol 10 – Vol 11 – Vol 12 – Vol 13 – Vol 14
BLIND GIRLS – The Weight of Everything
My local mathcore darlings have finally released a new one, and I am pumped. This is one of the last bands I saw live before the pandemic and it was intense, I loved it. Is it really a mathcore show if the vocalist isn’t convulsing on the floor screaming into the microphone? The Weight Of Everything is SO good and I really hope it makes the rounds among fans of The Callous Daoboys, Pupil Slicer and Ithaca. It deserves it. I AM FILLED WITH SO MUCH ENERGY I WANT TO COMMIT CRIME. I can barely compose my thoughts on this at the moment because I really am on an intense upswing at the moment but I’ll double back to write a full-length review on this one somewhere. I fucking love emoviolence. AHHHHH. Mathcore of the year, fuck you.
(A bad photo I took at the show I mentioned)
Homeskin – Cries Methodically
Homeskin/Frogoroth – Frogskin
Homeskin – Old Smeuse
It’s Garry again (Sallow Moth, Cara Neir, Gonemage) with yet another kind of sound; he is becoming increasingly unhinged. The first is a blackened grind album that is like the strobe light of grindcore, it will blind your ears. It’s unreasonable music, to say the least. Old Smeuse is a one minute grindcore LP and it’s actually good. The split is closer to black metal Homeskin and Frogoroth is a pretty rad raw black metal band it turns out. I really like the vocal styles and the sense of distance in the mix. It’s fucked up how good all this is and how fast he can churn these out.
eyesnomouth – Griefhole // NIHIL // The Infinity Of Non Existence
The UK has more than proven its ability to produce quality sludge and hardcore, and eyesnomouth bring us the best of both worlds, twice. Oh hang on, they released another one since I started writing this and it’s a bit more melodic, it’s also very good. It makes me miss being in a shitty live venue getting grimy with the mosh and more than a couple of camo 3/4 pants in the crowd. I like this style of recording/production a lot, it feels very honest (?). Out of the three I’d say the newest one is my favorite which is a good sign for a clearly motivated band.
Autosarcophagy – Dolor
This is pretty close to my favorite death metal album of the year so far, whatever “naturalistic death metal” is, it rules. There’s black metal in here as well with some very tech deathy guitar elements which is an awesome pairing and they weave back into various death vocal styles. It’s just really good ok, listen to it. The 3-minute mark of “Incantation of Resinated Blood” will fuck you up, you’ll call in sick to work.
Cancelled Earth – A Treatise On Pointlessness
Super underground solo Australian project, I’ve got most of their tapes and they are consistently filthy and disorientating with their flurry of death and a bit of that cavernous death/doom the kids are talking about. This is more death metal though. Pretty mysterious really, they have no social media presence to promote their work and I never see it posted anywhere, also I have no recollection of how I found them other than I just find things in the gaping maw that is Bandcamp sorted by new. Despite this, they have been consistent in their output. As if it doesn’t matter who hears it because its creation process was the point. Or maybe they just don’t like social media. Put this one on at the dentist.
Gurgulator – Risen From The Slime!
Lower your brow as far as you can, make your brows into a moustache if you can, because this is cartoonish levels of thrashy goregrind. I assume it’s about slime, I don’t know entirely as the lyrics aren’t available but I think it’s safe it say this album is probably about terrible things. That’s goregrind. The sole creator of this project typically does raw black metal and melodic black metal as far as I can tell, so I was honestly surprised that this is actually a fully fleshed-out album that delivers on the genre tropes well. It gets into the brutal death metal realm too and has a heap of good guitar solo moments. At one point on the track “Fleshworms” the vocalist actually sounded like slime, it was gross. It’s goregrind.
Blade Of Marrow – Luminous Rot
Project from general cool guy James, who I first ran into through the ACAB-fueled post-hardcore band A Constant Knowledge Of Death. When I say this album is not what I was expecting, I don’t mean a drastic genre shift or an artist zigzagging when they’d normally zagzig. I mean this album has noise walls, acoustic guitar, a rap track featuring TAHA, post-rock, a Thrice cover and a bunch of stuff that probably went over my head. This is absurd and creative and I enjoyed it a lot, particularly that one of the saddest tracks on here is named “Staggered Through The I-Frames”, which if you’re a Soulsborne player, is one of the greatest betrayals in life. The songs are unique, cryptic and deeply personal. Luminous Rot absolutely lives up to the “cathartic release of the worst of my being” self-description on Bandcamp. Just look at that album art too, dang.
Déhà – Decadanse
An intriguing project using electronics to blur things in a way where it’s difficult to assign a distinct genre tag to it. Even when it seems to follow some kind of conventional rhythm, there’s something in the background that feels somewhat alien. Whether it’s the odd sound of some of the beats or the spooky synths/strings, there’s always something happening just beneath the surface of moody black metal and chaotic death/doom. It feels trve, it feels arcane, it feels gothic and it also feels like a musical bastard the kvlt kids will disown over production choices. A lot of musicians will try to smooth electronic elements over so it sounds closer to the real thing while Déhà finds as many was as possible to embellish these extreme metal sounds with unusual digital sounds. A good one for fans of Igorrr in that regard, but add heaps of actually logical metal to it. There’re two gigantic tracks and the artist sums them up perfectly: “Imagine two dark stories that were born in prehistoric times and that end in a future in which death via the vacuum of space is a means of torture. In one, the Devil of all things. In the other, prayer for the goddess of war.”
Nailwalker – The Gutted Trout of Dear Life
Crusty, doomy, blackened death metal, I’m running out of ways to describe what I would ultimately call “fucked shit”. It’s unsettling and punishing to start before surprising the listener with a shift from deathgrind vocals towards more traditional black metal vocals and prominent horn instrumentation on the second track. I honestly don’t know what to make of this band, I don’t know what their reoccurring old-timey naval warfare album cover aesthetic is about or if it ties into the lyrics at all. The mood isn’t consistent across all the tracks either but I like that, it suits my attention span. On first listen you begin to wonder if the current mode is going to persist for the rest of the album or if it was merely one more shift, and spoilers, it was just one more shift and it was cool and yes the horns do come back, thankfully. If anyone knows what’s going on here drop a line in the comments.
Class Traitor – Calving
Punishing. Brooding. Apocalyptic. These are words. I am using them to describe an Australian blackened sludge album that you should listen to. A bit of an underground supergroup in my eyes, featuring members of experimental heavy bands like Munt, Bøg, Diploid & Beggar. Munt is the only long sleeve metal shirt I own and I wear it everywhere and they rule, and I covered Bøg in a previous volume of Free Flush. It’s rawer than an outdoor deli at midday in the Australian summer. When there are clean vocals and melodies, it’s not used for serene purposes, it’s quite sinister. A good listen for fans of Religious Observance and Body Void. I know this technically came out in 2021 but the cassette got released this year and Transylvanian Recordings is cool enough to have most of their releases set as free digital and has a consistently good roster.
Possessed Promotions – Trapcore’s Bangin’ Hits
I understand the audience for this on here is very small but I am a part of that audience. It’s like rap, but everyone is screaming and the beat is menacing and there’s more likely to be guitars involved. There’s 62 alarming tracks shared between a dozen or so artists and then those artists are also often featuring on each other’s songs, so it’s surprisingly cohesive in sound for a such a big compilation. It doesn’t feel too random or jarring beyond what is done so intentionally. It’s honestly very good, some of the bands lean more towards metal elements and others more towards hardcore elements. The energy stays at a Ritalin-induced high either way.
Anyway, I’ll save the others for later, there’s some really cool stuff on the Bandcamp wiki I want to cover still. Support the artists if possible, spread this article if you found some stuff you like. Have a good one.
